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Something for the Weekend

An illustration by Pascal Blanchet, author of the charming White Rapids*, for the National Post’s Spring Books Quarterly.

Text Without Context An interesting article on reading and the web by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, which discusses books by David Shields, Jaron Lanier, Cass Sunstein, Farhad Manjoo and others (and yes, I appreciate the irony of me of linking an article about the fragmentary nature of reading online and only quoting one paragraph):

THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.

The Bkkeepr — Book Oven’s Hugh McGuire interviews James Bridle of BookTwo and Bookkake:

We can berate publishers for making what we think are bad decisions about digital, but to accuse them of cluelessness just inflates a very dangerous animosity. Publishers love books as much, if not more, than most readers. It’s one of the very few industries where this is true almost all the way up. And we should be working together for the best of all possible futures for books and authors and readers.

(And you can read Hugh’s response to the Michiko Kakutani article — which he takes issue with — here)

Route One — Sarah Weinman at Daily Finance looks at indie publishers experimenting subscription models that reach readers directly.

And finally…

Designer Matt Avery talks about his beautiful design for Chicago by Dominic Pacyga (University of Chicago Press) at Faceout Books.

* White Rapids is published by D+Q and distributed in Canada by my employer, Raincoast Books.